The evolution of typewriting was far from complete when Mur- ray made the connection between telegraphic practice and typewriting in 1905. It was by no means clear yet what a typewriter should be like or how it should be operated. In particular, it was by no means clear that touch typing had to be touch typing as we know it today, on a QWERTY keyboard. Many early typewriters in fact employed chord keysets. It took the emergence of touch typing on a QWERTY keyboard as an incorporating practice to settle
The Chord Keyset and the QWERTY Keyboard 71
that issue and to finally seem to banish the chord keyset to the museum of ob- solete technologies. QWERTY keyboards, chord keysets, and, indeed, Morse telegraph keys all share an essential characteristic: the unlinking" of the hand, eye, and letter. Focusing on the typewriter, Friedrich Kittler, in his impressive Discourse Net- works, 1800/1900, notes:
In typewriting, spatiality determines not only the relations among signs but also their relation to the empty ground. . . .

…

In the different context of electronic computing fifty to one hundred years later, the performance advantages of the five-bit devices that Engelbart employed still existed. Although the QWERTY keyboard lay- out has been severely criticized since the 1930'S at least, with the invention of the Dvorak keyboard and its supposed efficiencies, no other type input device
80 The Chord Keyset and the QWERTY Keyboard
ever has managed to challenge its supremacy. 8 As Jan Noyes (19 8 3 a , 278-79) puts it in "The QWERTY Keyboard: A Review":
Rearranging the letters of the QWERTY layout has been shown to be a fruitless pastime, but it has demonstrated two important points: first, the amount of hos- tile feeling that the standard keyboard has generated and second, the supremacy of this keyboard in retaining its universal position. . . . The design and the layout of the QWERTY keyboard are not optimal for efficient operation. However it is not feasible to modify the standard keyboard and hence improve, because of con- founding factors pertinent to QWERTY's situation.

…

I immediately realized that I was using one of the most efficient tools that I ever had the opportunity to encounter. As I eventually discovered, its value as an input device had been well recognized since the nineteenth century. Engelbart was able to ignore its subsequent eclipse and see how it could serve his purposes for user-machine communications in a way that what had become the standard, ubiquitous input device, the QWERTY keyboard, could not. What he was unable to ignore, however, was the hegemony of the QWERTY keyboard.
"RE-INVENTING THE HIGH-WHEEL BICYCLE WITH GOVERNMENT FUNDS"
The charge that, at this early stage, Engelbart was simply returning to an obso- lete and discarded technology was made by one of his sponsors, Harold Woos- ter, director of the Information Sciences Directorate of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research at the time of Engelbart's second proposal.

Nobody has been able to reconstruct Sholes’s and Densmore’s reasoning completely. It would probably be necessary to find an operating Model 1 or 2 typewriter and experiment with combinations of letters. The QWERTY keyboard, as it came to be known, was clearly a compromise. On the middle row of text there was a nearly alphabetical sequence: DFGHJKLM. The last letter was later moved to the bottom row, where the original C and X were also later reversed. On the top row was a vowel cluster (UIO) out of alphabetical order. Sholes and Densmore were both familiar with newspaper type cases, arranged not in alphabetical order but roughly according to letter frequency. The QWERTY keyboard did not follow these patterns but was conceived in a similar spirit.27
Sholes and Densmore made a fateful assumption about the operator’s technique. Compositors used thumb and forefinger and looked at the type case as they worked, and it seemed reasonable to think that typewriter operators would do the same—as, indeed, all but a few initially did.

…

Norman and Fisher found that although the Dvorak arrangement did indeed save on motion as its advocates had long claimed, gains in speed were modest: the advantage was only about 5 to 10 percent. They found the long-maligned QWERTY keyboard surprisingly rational in its high number of alternating-hand sequences. The Norman studies and others bolstered an influential 1990 rebuttal to Paul David’s analysis by two fellow economists, S. J. Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis, who argued that the Dvorak arrangement had lost on its merits.41
The critics of the Dvorak layout have a point. Typists’ minds are able to manage the additional 37 percent finger travel of the QWERTY keyboard without a corresponding loss of speed. Differentials range from a mere 2.6 percent for Dvorak, to 11 percent. A 1980 Japanese study suggested 15 to 25 percent faster performance in timed writing and 25 to 50 percent faster production of letters, reports, and tables.

…

Compositors used thumb and forefinger and looked at the type case as they worked, and it seemed reasonable to think that typewriter operators would do the same—as, indeed, all but a few initially did. For this style of work the QWERTY keyboard was relatively efficient. Its leading twentieth-century critic, August Dvorak, found that the most frequent letters were typed with the first two fingers of the left hand and the index finger of the right. There seems to be a balance between putting all the most frequent characters near the center of the keyboard and maintaining an order that will make it easier to find keys visually, like keeping O and P as well as the middle-row sequence together.
As early as 1875, proposals circulated for more efficient keyboards. Once touch typing prevailed, it would have been logical to look for even greater speed and comfort by devising a new arrangement.

As one example, I mentioned in Chapter 13 the QWERTY keyboard for typewriters. It was adopted initially, out of many competing keyboard designs, for trivial specific reasons involving early typewriter construction in America in the 1860s, typewriter salesmanship, a decision in 1882 by a certain Ms. Longley who founded the Shorthand and Typewriter Institute in Cincinnati, and the success of Ms. Longley's star typing pupil Frank McGurrin, who thrashed Ms. Longley's non-QWERTY competitor Louis Taub in a widely publicized typing contest in 1888. The decision could have gone to another keyboard at any of numerous stages between the 1860s and the 1880s; nothing about the American environment favored the QWERTY keyboard over its rivals. Once the decision had been made, though, the QWERTY keyboard became so entrenched that it was also adopted for computer keyboard design a century later.

…

The reason behind all of those seemingly counterproductive features is that the typewriters of 1873 jammed if adjacent keys were struck in quick suc- cession, so that manufacturers had to slow down typists. When improve- ments in typewriters eliminated the problem of jamming, trials in 1932 with an efficiently laid-out keyboard showed that it would let us double our typing speed and reduce our typing effort by 95 percent. But QWERTY keyboards were solidly entrenched by then. The vested interests of hundreds of millions of QWERTY typists, typing teachers, typewriter and computer salespeople, and manufacturers have crushed all moves toward keyboard efficiency for over 60-years.
While the story of the QWERTY keyboard may sound funny, many similar cases have involved much heavier economic consequences. Why does Japan now dominate the world market for transistorized electronic consumer products, to a degree that damages the United States's balance of payments with Japan, even though transistors were invented and pat- ented in the United States?

…

Millions of people today buy designer jeans for double the price of equally durable generic jeansbecause the social cachet of the designer label counts for more than the extra cost. Similarly, Japan continues to use its horrendously cumbersome kanji writ- ing system in preference to efficient alphabets or Japan's own efficient kana syllabarybecause the prestige attached to kanji is so great.
Still another factor is compatibility with vested interests. This book, like probably every other typed document you have ever read, was typed with a QWERTY keyboard, named for the left-most six letters in its upper row. Unbelievable as it may now sound, that keyboard layout was designed in 1873 as a feat of anti-engineering. It employs a whole series of perverse tricks designed to force typists to type as slowly as possible, such as scatter- ing the commonest letters over all keyboard rows and concentrating them on the left side (where right-handed people have to use their weaker hand).

Gourville writes that products that require a high degree of behavior change are doomed to fail even if the benefits of using the new product are clear and substantial.
For example, the technology I am using to write this book is inferior to existing alternatives in many ways. I’m referring to the QWERTY keyboard which was first developed in the 1870s for the now-ancient typewriter. QWERTY was designed with commonly used characters spaced far apart. This layout prevented typists from jamming the metal typebars of early machines.
[xxvii] Of course, this physical limitation is an anachronism in the digital age, yet QWERTY keyboards remain the standard despite the invention of far better layouts.
Professor August Dvorak’s keyboard design, for example, placed vowels in the center row, increasing typing speed and accuracy. Though patented in 1932, the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard was written off.

The letter j sort of looks like an arrow pointing downward. On a Qwerty keyboard, the h and l keys are positioned to the left and right of each other, mirroring the direction in which they move the cursor.
Although h, j, k, and l may seem unintuitive at first, learning to use them is worth your while. To reach for the arrow keys, you have to move your hand away from its resting place on the home row. Because the h, j, k, and l keys are all within easy reach, you can move Vim’s cursor without having to move your hand.
That might sound like a trivial saving, but it adds up. Once you’ve acquired the habit of using h, j, k, and l to move around, using any other editor that depends on the arrow keys will feel strange. You’ll wonder how you put up with it for so long!
Leave Your Right Hand Where It Belongs
On a Qwerty keyboard, the j, k, and l keys fall directly beneath the index, middle, and ring fingers of the right hand.

…

We can’t cover them all in this chapter, so I recommend that you look up the motion.txt ​ section of Vim’s documentation for a complete reference. Set yourself the goal of adding a couple of motions to your repertoire each week.
Tip 46 Keep Your Fingers on the Home Row
Vim is optimized for the touch typist. Learn to move around without removing your hands from the home row, and you’ll be able to operate Vim quicker.
The first thing you learn as a touch typist is that your fingers should rest on the home row. On a Qwerty keyboard, that means the left-hand fingers rest on a, s, d, and f, while the right-hand fingers rest on j, k, l, and ; keys. When poised in this position, we can reach for any other key on the keyboard without having to move our hands or look at our fingers. It’s the ideal posture for touch typing.
Just as with any other text editor, Vim lets us use the arrow keys to move the cursor around, but it also provides an alternative by way of the h, j, k, and l keys.

…

You’re wasting keystrokes if you press the h key more than two times in a row. When it comes to moving horizontally, you can get around quicker using word-wise or character search motions (see Tip 48, and Tip 49).
I use the h and l keys for off-by-one errors, when I narrowly miss my target. Apart from that, I hardly touch them. Given how little I use the h key, I’m happy to have to stretch for it on a Qwerty keyboard. On the flip side, I use the character search commands often (see Tip 49), so I’m pleased that the ; key rests comfortably beneath my little finger.
Break the Habit of Reaching for the Arrow Keys
If you’re finding it difficult to break the habit of using the arrow keys, try putting this in your vimrc file:
motions/disable-arrowkeys.vim
​​noremap <Up> <Nop>​​
​​noremap <Down> <Nop>​​
​​noremap <Left> <Nop>​​
​​noremap <Right> <Nop>​​
This maps each of the arrow keys to do nothing.

One of the problems of the early models was that when operated at high speed, the type-bars would clash and jam the machine. On the very first machines, the letters of the keyboard had been arranged in alphabetical order, and the major cause of the jamming was the proximity of commonly occurring letter pairs (such as D and E, or S and T). The easiest way around this jamming problem was to arrange the letters in the type-basket so that they were less likely to collide. The result was the QWERTY keyboard layout that is still with us. (Incidentally, a vestige of the original alphabetical ordering can be seen on the middle row of the keyboard, where the sequence FGHJKL appears.)
Densmore made two attempts to get the Sholes typewriter manufactured by small engineering workshops, but they both lacked the necessary capital and skill to manufacture successfully and cheaply. As one historian of manufacturing has noted, the “typewriter was the most complex mechanism mass produced by American industry, public or private, in the nineteenth century.”

…

Palm never achieved more than a 3 percent market share and was quickly overshadowed in its primary market—business users—by Research in Motion (RIM), a Canadian specialist in paging, messaging, data capture, and modem equipment that launched the PDA “Blackberry” in 1999. Blackberry benefited in the business and government handset markets from RIM’s private data network, user-friendly e-mail, and miniature QWERTY keyboard. Microsoft, which came late to the PDA/smartphone platform business by licensing Windows-based mobile operating systems, had some success in the enterprise market before smartphones became consumer oriented and the touchscreen-based Apple iOS and Android systems rose to dominance.
While Apple’s Macintosh was a technical success at its launch in 1984, it helped Microsoft far more than Apple itself (by showing the dominant operating-system company the way to a user-friendly graphics-based operating system).

…

Watson is Thomas Beldens and Marva Beldens’s The Lengthening Shadow (1962); it is not particularly hagiographic, but William Rogers’s Think: A Biography of the Watsons and IBM (1969) is a useful counterbalance. The most recent biography of Watson is Kevin Maney’s The Maverick and His Machine (2003). JoAnne Yates’ Structuring the Information Age (2005) is an important account of how interactions between IBM and its life-insurance customers helped shape IBM’s products.
Page 22“let them in on the ground floor”: Quoted in Bliven 1954, p. 48.
Page 23the QWERTY keyboard layout that is still with us: See David 1986.
Page 23“typewriter was the most complex mechanism mass produced by American industry”: Hoke 1990, p. 133.
Page 23“reporters, lawyers, editors, authors, and clergymen”: Cortada 1993a, p. 16.
Page 23“Gentlemen: Please do not use my name”: Quoted in Bliven 1954, p. 62.
Page 24By 1900 the US Census recorded 112,000 typists: Davies 1982, pp. 178–179.

Its author, Naoki Higashida, was born in 1992 and was still in junior high-school when the book was published. Naoki’s autism is severe enough to make spoken communication pretty much impossible, even now. But thanks to an ambitious teacher and his own persistence, he learnt to spell out words directly onto an alphabet grid. A Japanese alphabet grid is a table of the basic forty Japanese hiragana letters, and its English counterpart is a copy of the QWERTY keyboard, drawn onto a card and laminated. Naoki communicates by pointing to the letters on these grids to spell out whole words, which a helper at his side then transcribes. These words build up into sentences, paragraphs and entire books. ‘Extras’ around the side of the grids include numbers, punctuation, and the words ‘Finished’, ‘Yes’ and ‘No’. (Although Naoki can also write and blog directly onto a computer via its keyboard, he finds the lower-tech alphabet grid a ‘steadier hand-rail’ as it offers fewer distractions and helps him to focus.)

In addition, the first row was provided with all of the letters in the word “typewriter,” so that salesmen, new to typing, could type the word using just one row.
Quickly, however, mechanical improvements made faster typing possible, and new keyboards placing letters according to frequency were presented. But it was too late: There was no going back. By the 1890s, typists across America were used to QWERTY keyboards, having learned to zip away on new versions of them that did not stick so easily. Retraining them would have been expensive and, ultimately, unnecessary, so QWERTY was passed down the generations, and even today we use the queer QWERTY configuration on computer keyboards, where jamming is a mechanical impossibility.
The basic concept is simple, but in general estimation tends to be processed as the province of “cute” stories like the QWERTY one, rather than explaining a massive weight of scientific and historical processes.

The innovations that music inspired turned out to unlock other doors in the adjacent possible, in fields seemingly unrelated to music, the way the “Instrument Which Plays by Itself” carved out a pathway that led to textile design and computer software. Seeking out new sounds led us to create new tools—which invariably suggested new uses for those tools.
Legendary violin maker Stradivari’s workshop
Consider one of the most essential and commonly used inventions of the computer age: the QWERTY keyboard. Many of us today spend a significant portion our waking hours pressing keys with our fingertips to generate a sequence of symbols on a screen or page: typing up numbers in a spreadsheet, writing e-mails, or tapping out texts on virtual keyboards displayed on smartphone screens. Anyone who works at a computer all day likely spends far more time interacting with keyboards than with more celebrated modern inventions like automobiles.

In the most famous metaphor of chaos theory, a butterfly flapping its wings provokes a tornado thousands of
miles away and days later. 18
Systems in which initial conditions affect subsequent behavior
indefinitely are path dependent. 19 Path dependency is why the film
industry is still based in Hollywood. The design of our computer
keyboards is path dependent: the QWERTY layout was devised in
the earliest days of typewriting, and although it is ergonomically
inefficient, users are familiar with it and the number of QWERTY
keyboards and typists is too large to make any change possible. 20
The coevolution of technology and institutions-the development of
the social and economic infrastructure of rich states-has been path
dependent.
But path dependency in which outcomes are sensitive to small
details-the problem of the butterfly and the tornado-is fatal to
forecasting. The hopes that were placed in the development of computers and mathematical modeling have been disappointed.

…

There is probably no strong reason why the United
States, and France, chose the right, and Britain the left, but they did.
Path dependency then took over. Countries made choices dictated by
their colonial masters, or by larger countries in close proximity. It is
now unlikely that any major country will switch-the last to change
was Sweden, which moved from left to right during one extraordinary
night in 1967. The QWERTY keyboard layout is another example of a
path dependent solution to a coordination problem. Standards, like
keyboard layouts, are everywhere. Currency is a standard. So is Ianguage. We need to use the same money, the same words, as the people
around us.
Television sets need to be compatible with television broadcasts.
The FCC-prescribed NSTC is used in the United States, but most of
the rest of the world uses the German PAL system.

It isn’t simply a matter of designing some delightful new way to present images of information on a computer. It’s just as much a matter of reckoning with—and not simply discarding—past habits. For instance, the QWERTY keyboard has for years been the universally familiar means of typing and entering information into a computer. QWERTY, which refers to the first six keys on the left side of the third row of a keyboard, was a relic, a keyboard arrangement from the era of manual typewriters that was designed to keep the individual letter-embossing hammers from getting tangled up when the user was typing at high speed.
Christie and Ording decided against altering this ubiquitous, albeit hidebound, preference. Instead, they would experiment with having a virtual QWERTY keyboard appear on the screen when you needed to type. As they began to experiment with multi-touch, they found that they could do all kinds of things that were both effective and fun.

(A common device was a letter wheel requiring the user to turn the wheel to strike each letter.) The idea of an individual key for each letter was turned into a working solution primarily by a former newspaper editor, Christopher Sholes, in Milwaukee. On a third try, he produced a small number of working machines that outpaced manual scribes, one of which, from 1872–1873, survives. It is recognizably a modern mechanical typewriter, complete with a QWERTY keyboard. (The original keyboard was in alphabetical order, but Sholes realized that when closely spaced keys, like s and t, were struck in sequence, they tended to jam. The QWERTY sequence was the random outcome of multiple key rearrangements to reduce high-frequency, closely spaced sequences. The DFGH sequence in the middle row is a remnant of the original layout.)
Successful though they were, the Milwaukee prototypes highlighted the severity of the manufacturing challenge, for typewriters were “the most complex mechanism mass produced by American industry, public or private, in the nineteenth century.”35 Sholes and a financial partner had the good sense to seek a professional manufacturer; they settled on E.

…

After a number of financial reverses, it spun off the typewriter business to the biggest distributor in 1886. The new company, the Standard Typewriter Company, renamed itself Remington Typewriter in 1902 and was later part of Sperry Rand.
Early Surviving Scholes Typewriter, c. 1872–1873. The typewriter developed primarily by a Milwaukee editor, Christopher Scholes, was the first to look like a recognizable modern typewriter. Note the QWERTY keyboard. Schole’s first keyboard was alphabetical, but closely-spaced frequent companion letters tended to jam. The new keyboard arrangement was the random outcome of Schole’s trial-and-error method of addressing the problem.
By the 1890s, there was a host of competitors—Hall Typewriters, American Writing Machine, Oliver, L. C. Smith & Brothers—and the industry, unlike sewing machines, evolved into a manufacturing competition.

Taken more broadly, this kind of metadata can be thought of as a pedigree: who thinks that this document is valuable? How closely correlated have this person's value judgments been with mine in times gone by? This kind of implicit endorsement of information is a far better candidate for an information-retrieval panacea than all the world's schema combined.
Amish for QWERTY
(Originally published on the O'Reilly Network, 07/09/2003)
I learned to type before I learned to write. The QWERTY keyboard layout is hard-wired to my brain, such that I can't write anything of significance without that I have a 101-key keyboard in front of me. This has always been a badge of geek pride: unlike the creaking pen-and-ink dinosaurs that I grew up reading, I'm well adapted to the modern reality of technology. There's a secret elitist pride in touch-typing on a laptop while staring off into space, fingers flourishing and caressing the keys.

In many cases, on a mobile device, changing the input type will also cause the device to put up a custom keyboard to enable the user to enter the right kind of data. For instance, if type is set to number, the device can put up a numeric keypad. For a type of tel, the device can put up a numeric keypad that looks a little different but is optimized for entering phone numbers. For a type of email, the keyboard will be a standard QWERTY keyboard but modified for the entry of email addresses.
One input type that is especially useful for smartphone applications is the speech input type: <input type="text" x-webkit-speech/>. The speech tag will take what the user said and translate it into text. My Android phone, for instance, has a Google Search widget that can search by voice. The speech tag still allows the user to type text normally as well.

It was used by businessmen and state officials, including the commissioner of police at Scotland Yard, who sat "spider-like in a web of co-extension with the metropolis" as he monitored reports coming in from all over London. Members of the royal family also had their own private lines installed.
Another popular automatic system was devised by David Hughes, a professor of music in Kentucky. Appropriately enough, given his musical background, the Hughes printer, launched in 1855, had a pianolike keyboard with alternating white and black keys, one for each letter (the modern QWERTY keyboard was not invented until twenty years later). It worked on a similar principle to that of the ABC telegraph, but with a constantly rotating "chariot," driven by clockwork, which was stopped in its tracks whenever a key was held down at the sending station. At the same moment an electromagnet activated a hammer, printing a character on a paper tape. The Hughes printer could be operated by anyone—it simply involved pressing the letter keys in order—and it provided a printed message that anyone could read, without the need for an operator at the receiving end.

Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage
by
Roger L. Martin

Well, you have to know what the paradox is.” In order to advance knowledge, the design thinker has to get comfortable delving into the mystery, trying to see new things or to see things in a new way.
In the early days of the BlackBerry, Lazaridis saw that laptop users were demanding smaller and smaller devices, while the industry was bumping up against the size limitations of small keyboards and display screens. A standard QWERTY keyboard can only get so small before it becomes awkward and uncomfortable to use. A screen displaying all the information a user expects can be reduced only so much before it becomes unreadable or painfully cluttered.
Staring at this paradox—this mystery—Lazaridis stepped back and asked what could be true. What if users didn’t use all their fingers to type? What if the information we think must be displayed actually gets in the way of understanding?

The disconnection between prosperity and justice would come as no surprise
to Karl Marx as they capture the Janus-headed nature of market capitalism.
Although its innovative powers for dramatic economic change are clearly
evident, it has also created chronic instability and inequality.
Economists call the way countries are locked into a predetermined future “path
dependency” because it’s difﬁcult to break free of past ways of organizing various
forms of economic activity. A classic example is the QWERTY keyboard, which
once established makes it difﬁcult to shift to another format. See Paul A. David,
“Clio and the Economics of QWERTY,” American Economic Review, 75, no. 2
(1985): 332–337.
David Kusnet, Lawrence Mishel, and Ruy Teixeira, Talking Past Each Other:
What Everyday Americans Really Think (and Elites Don’t Get) about the Economy
(Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute, 2006).
Doreen Massey, winner of Nobel Prize geography’s, correctly talks about space
as relational and the need to extend our understanding of responsibility beyond
the local because we are all locals as well as global citizens.

(I realise that isn't saying much, but Hollywood does frame the way many of us think about future technologies.) The essence of the plot is that the hero falls in love with his digital assistant, with intriguing consequences. Although he uses keyboards occasionally, most of the time they communicate verbally.
There will be times when we want to communicate with our “friends” without making a sound. Portable “qwerty” keyboards will not suffice, and virtual hologram keyboards may take too long to arrive – and they may feel too weird to use even if and when they do arrive. Communication via brain-computer interfaces will take still longer to become feasible, so perhaps we will all have to learn a new interface – maybe a one-handed device looking something like an ocarina[cxlv].
Another way we may communicate with our Friends, and indeed with many of the newly intelligible objects in the Internet of Things is radar.

The goal of continuity is to make the Internet as intuitive as possible, to make the network a natural-feeling extension of the
user’s own body. Thus, any mediation between the user and the network
must be eliminated. Interfaces must be as transparent as possible. The user
must be able to move through the network with unfettered ease.
All traces of the medium should be hidden, hence the evolution from the
less intuitive “QWERTY” keyboard to technologies such as the touch screen
(e.g., Palm and other PDAs) and voice recognition software.
Feedback loops. As the discussion of Brecht and Enzensberger shows, the
history of media has been the history of the prohibition of many-to-many
communication. Many-to-many communication is a structure of communication where each receiver of information is also potentially a sender of information.

Instead of a portable typewriter – which were never that portable – or scribbled longhand notes that had then to be read to copytakers back in London, which could lead to the sort of error that once saw the Warsaw Pact become the Walsall Pact – there was the Tandy 200. A clunky but functional ‘portable computer’ that was effectively little more than an electronic typewriter with an LCD black-on-green display, the Tandy was the journalist’s lifesaver. It had a full-sized QWERTY keyboard and was powered by four AA batteries, the sort you could buy just about anywhere in the world, even behind the Iron Curtain. There was also the benefit of being able to send your copy directly into the newspaper’s own computer systems.
The miracle of written words transformed into electronic signals and transmitted over the ether is so common now that it seems antique to remember that just twenty years ago, the most successful way to do it was to affix two ‘crocodile clips’ from the Tandy’s output directly to telephone wires.

In 1927, Commander Edward Travis, a member of GC&CS who oversaw the construction and security of British codes and cyphers, asked Hugh Foss, a specialist in machine cyphers, to test the commercially available machine.
The Enigma machine resembled a small typewriter encased in a wooden box. It had a typewriter-style keyboard, set out in the continental QWERTZU manner, which differed slightly from the standard British/American QWERTY keyboard. Above the keyboard, on top of the box, was a lampboard with a series of lights, one for each letter of the alphabet. The operator typed each letter of the plain-text message into the machine. The action of depressing the key sent an electrical current through the machine, which lit up the encyphered letter on the lampboard.
The encypherment mechanism consisted of three or four teethed wheels or rotors which were inserted into the machine.

In the new NLS system, each workstation consisted of a keyboard for entering data and alongside it a mouse with three buttons and a five-key keyboard. The small keyboard, which looked a bit like a short piano without sharps and flats, could be used either for entering text or for sending commands to the system, making it possible to edit rapidly with two hands without being forced to move a hand between the keyboard and mouse.
For those who had been trained to use a standard qwerty keyboard, the Augment system took a while to get used to, and Engelbart glued one of the five-key keyboards to the dashboard of his car so he could practice using it while driving.
The Augment researchers tested the system and found that it was easy for the programmers to master and that it enabled blindingly fast and efficient editing. Some of the team even mastered the art of typing using the chord-key set exclusively—one young programmer was able to type more than fifty words per minute.

Speaking to students at the Asper School of Business in Winnipeg in June 2009, he declared: “Strategic ambiguity [is] death to a company…. It paralyzes organizations.” Unbeknown to the students, he was talking in part about his own company.
To Balsillie, RIM was in an existential crisis, mired in what he describes as “strategic confusion.” The company’s business had been disrupted on several levels, with no obvious path forward. Was RIM supposed to defend the QWERTY keyboard, or jump all-in and become a touch-screen smartphone maker? Was it supposed to challenge Apple at the high end of the smartphone market or focus on the lower end with devices like its Curve and Gemini models, which were driving heady sales gains in foreign markets where Apple wasn’t yet a factor? Should the company stick to its closed, proprietary software technology or open its platform?
One of the biggest puzzles was what to do about apps.

Later Apple—and pretty much only Apple, among the makers of e-readers—paid the penalty for that.
The same listen-to-no-one folly led to the 1985 disaster that was New Coke—a universally rejected replacement for old Coke that precisely no consumers had been asking for—and the serial messes that are Microsoft Word, the all-but-universal word processing program that becomes more confusing, less intuitive and more stuffed with dubious functions with each unnecessary upgrade. Like the QWERTY keyboard, it is a bad system that unfortunately became the dominant system, but at least QWERTY has remained the same since its introduction in 1873. Microsoft Word doubles down on bad every few years.
There are “I Hate Microsoft Word” forums and “I Hate Microsoft Word” rant threads. There is an “I Hate Microsoft Word” Facebook page. On one tech website, the author of a story called “The 10 Most Hated Programs of All Time” wrote: “Some people say ‘I hate Microsoft Word because it’s far too complicated!’

In the early seventeenth century, some 341 silver and 505 types of gold coin were in circulation in the Dutch Republic .14 Such a multiplicity of coins meant that individual traders could easily be confused by their value. This was an age-old problem which created the need for specialists who could distinguish between the different currency units. These were the ‘money changers’ that Jesus threw out of the temple. Another historic term, ‘touchstone’, derives from a method of assessing a coin’s metallic value.
Just as the QWERTY keyboard outlasted the manual typewriter, initial choices of names and weights have had long-lasting consequences. Pepin the Short, the father of Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor, lived from c.715 to 768. He established that a livre or pound of silver was worth 240 denarii or pennies, while the solidus was worth 12 denarii.15 This was the basis for the British monetary system for centuries until 1971.

Material growth, economic growth and human wellbeing can be decoupled.19
Path-dependence and innovation
But innovation does not happen in a vacuum. The downside to the propensity for knowledge to build upon knowledge is that it makes a radical shift in the course of technology and infrastructure much harder to achieve. Innovation is path-dependent: it is constrained by what has gone on before. Ideas and practices are sticky. Examples abound. It is generally believed that the ostensibly odd design of the QWERTY keyboard was to prevent Englishlanguage typewriters from jamming. Very few typewriters are still in use, but the world is stuck with the keyboard, irrespective of whether it now enhances writing productivity. London’s city plan, including the shape and location of its new skyscrapers, is in part determined by Roman planning two millennia ago.
This is the phenomenon of ‘lock-in’: the ways in which existing infrastructure and ideas interact to set the course for future change.

“The Draper Classification seems to me all the better because the letters are not in alphabetical order,” Russell declared. “This helps to keep the novice from thinking that it is based on some theory of evolution.” Apparently the alphabet could flout its own order and still remain effective—or even improve its utility—as a labeling scheme. Pickering could see that much on his typewriter’s QWERTY keyboard.
The third of the questionnaire’s five questions contained three parts: “Do you think it would be wise for this committee to recommend at this time or in the near future any system of classification for universal adoption? If not, what additional observations or other work do you deem necessary before such recommendations should be made? Would you be willing to take part in this work?”
The mixed reactions to this question crossed party lines.

The consequence of this disclosure ossification, as we will demonstrate empirically in the following
chapters, is the inevitably fast and continuous deterioration in the usefulness
of financial information to investors.
A DEVIL’S ADVOCATE
Perhaps, you may say, this is inevitable. Corporate financial reporting
reached its technological apogee 110 years ago, as did double-entry bookkeeping 550 years ago, and cannot be further improved, like the QWERTY
keyboard layout introduced in 1878 in the Remington No. 2 typewriter and
still on keyboards today. Absurd as this sounds, it would have made some
sense if suggestions for accounting change were seriously tried and found to
fail. But there wasn’t any serious trial and error in accounting structure over
the past century. Even worthwhile suggestions for structural change, like the
one by a leading accounting thinker, Yuji Ijiri, a now retired Carnegie Mellon
professor, who proposed in 1989 the triple entry bookkeeping, which, to
the best of our knowledge, was never seriously discussed by accounting
regulators.6 In essence, Ijiri suggested that, in addition to the balance sheet
(a static report of assets and liabilities), and the income statement (a report
on the “distance” the firm traveled from beginning to end of period), there
should be a third report, akin to acceleration or momentum of operations,
informing on the pace of change over the period in sales, expenses, and
earnings.

For our typewriters have the order of the letters on their keyboard arranged in a nonoptimal manner, as a matter of fact in such a nonoptimal manner as to slow down the typing rather than make the job easy, in order to avoid jamming the ribbons as they were designed for less electronic days. Therefore, as we started building better typewriters and computerized word processors, several attempts were made to rationalize the computer keyboard, to no avail. People were trained on a QWERTY keyboard and their habits were too sticky for change. Just like the helical propulsion of an actor into stardom, people patronize what other people like to do. Forcing rational dynamics on the process would be superfluous, nay, impossible. This is called a path dependent outcome, and has thwarted many mathematical attempts at modeling behavior.
It is obvious that the information age, by homogenizing our tastes, is causing the unfairness to be even more acute—those who win capture almost all the customers.

Over the next
decade, he and his staffers at the Augmentation Research Center invented
some of the most ubiquitous features of contemporary computers, including the mouse. Between 1966 and 1968, the group developed a collaborative
ofﬁce computing environment known as the On-Line System, or NLS. The
NLS featured many of the elements common to computer systems today, including not only the mouse, but a QWERTY keyboard and a CRT terminal.
More importantly, the system offered its users the ability to work on a document simultaneously from multiple sites, to connect bits of text via hyperlinks, to jump from one point to another in a text, and to develop indexes of
key words that could be searched. The NLS depended on a time-sharing
computer, yet it functioned within the ofﬁce environment much like a contemporary intranet.

Stephenson’s working life* marks the point in the development of steam technology when the value of what economists call “network effects” finally overtook the importance of any individual invention, however brilliant. Setting the distance between the smooth tracks on which the Blucher traveled at four feet eight and a half inches was arbitrary—that was the width of the Killingworth Colliery wagonway—but its specific width was irrelevant. The value of any standard is not its intrinsic superiority, but the number of people using it. Like the famous example of the QWERTY keyboard, the Stephenson gauge became the world standard, and it is still the width used on more than 60 percent of the world’s railroads.
Of course, simply laying rails a particular distance apart does not make for a monopoly unless others follow. And others weren’t about to follow Stephenson’s lead until they were persuaded that there was some advantage to it, in the form of either increased revenue or lower costs.

They did a fine eMacs, though. Linus Torvalds’s greater skills in nerd-to-nerd
diplomacy got there with Linux.
12. Quotron is another example of the “don’t build special purpose computers” rule.
They did, and went from being synonymous with “electronic market data terminal”
to being nowhere in a remarkably short time. The first Quotrons were so alien to
Wall Street types that they rearranged the “QWERTY” keyboard to be “ABCDE.”
Schumpeter was right about capitalism being a process of creative destruction.
13. Large is a relative term here. The bleeding-edge machines of the mid-1980s had 32M
of memory. Fifteen years earlier, the onboard computers used on the lunar landings
had 64K.
14. Evan’s fine account of his career is in Alan Rubenfeld’s book, The Super Traders: Secrets
and Successes of Wall Street’s Best and Brightest (McGraw-Hill, 1995), pp. 227–252.
15.

It accomplishes this by using vibration technologies similar to the motors that are activated when our phone is on vibrate mode. Apple is reportedly releasing a haptic-feedback, multitouch “mighty mouse” as a replacement for its current Mac mouse series.14
The one perceived shortcoming on the iPhone is the poor comparative usability of the on-screen keyboard, which has an unusually high error rate compared with its RIM competitor or a standard QWERTY keyboard. While Siri is an effort to reduce reliance on an on-screen keyboard, haptics may work as a mechanism to resolve the usability issues of an on-screen keyboard. If we feel like we are using a real keyboard as a result of haptic feedback, then the theory goes that the keyboard (and the user) will behave as if it is “real”, and accuracy will be improved dramatically.
This is why it is possible that the mouse and physical keyboard will disappear over the next 10 years.

As their skills fade with them, however, we rely ever more on technology. This new generation of maps and models is thus more than a collection of pretty digital guides. They should be the focal point for the synthesis of environmental science, politics, economics, culture, technology, and sociology3—a curriculum curated through the study of connections rather than divisions. We shouldn’t be using static political maps any more than we would cling to QWERTY keyboards when we have voice recognition, gestural interfaces, and instant video communication.
Today’s “digital natives”—also known as millennials or Generation Y (and Z)—need this new tool kit. There are more young people alive today than ever in history: Forty percent of the world population is under the age of twenty-four, meaning an even larger percentage has no personal memory of colonialism or the Cold War.

Noah eventually got work as Dr. Carter on ER,
so Steven farms out the napkin folding.
6. Quotron is another example of the “don’t build special-purpose
computers” rule. It did, and went from being synonymous with
“electronic market data terminal” to being nowhere in a remarkably
JWPR007-Lindsey
May 18, 2007
11:41
Notes
341
short time. The first Quotrons were so alien to Wall Street types
that they rearranged the “QWERTY” keyboard to be ABCDE.
Schumpeter was right about capitalism being a process of creative
destruction.
7. Large is a relative term here. The bleeding-edge machines of the
mid-1980s had 32MB of memory. Fifteen years earlier, the on-board
computers used on the lunar landings had 64K. Today, you can get
a 1GB memory card for about forty bucks.
8. “A Little AI Goes A Long Way on Wall Street,” D. Leinweber and
Y.

pages: 504words: 126,835

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard
by
Fredrik Erixon,
Bjorn Weigel

Around the same time as Ballmer’s brash dismissal of Apple, Research in Motion (RiM), the parent company of BlackBerry, ridiculed the iPhone as a marginal event in the market for cellular phones. That arrogance seemed daring, even at that time. RiM had grown from a small Canadian pager company to a major, multi-billion-dollar mobile company in just a few years. It had made its fortune by mobilizing computer services, enabling people to read and write emails from anywhere in the world using a QWERTY keyboard. It could not have been a distant thought that there would be demand for a new mobile device that allowed people to surf the web everywhere too.
And it wasn’t a distant thought. RiM understood that change was coming. But the profits it made from its own blockbuster email device were still too substantial and tempted them to stick just a little bit longer with the old, instead of moving to a new product that had a different keyboard and a screen suitable for web services.

pages: 431words: 129,071

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us
by
Will Storr

He copy-and-pasted WORD, WORD, WORD, WORD. ‘So I could get myself some material on a blank piece of paper and then I’d say, well, this is going to be more important than it looks, so I’d like to set up a “file”. So I tell the machine, “Output to a file.” And it says, “I need a name.” I’ll give it a name. I’ll say it’s “sample file”.’ The screen faded to a shot of Engelbart’s hands. He was working on a typewriter-like QWERTY keyboard that was connected by wires to the monitor on which the words had been appearing and disappearing. To his right was a strange box containing wheels that he used to move the cursor. He called this contraption a ‘mouse’.
When it was all over, the crowd rose to their feet and cheered, spellbound, enthralled. Not only had Engelbart introduced the world to the notion of the computer as a personal assistant controlled by a mouse, keyboard and cursor, he’d shown them a graphical user interface which formed the basis of the ‘windows’ he’d been manipulating, hyperlinks and the concept of the networked online realm we know today as the Web.

“We showed Steve all of these things and he shot them all down. Steve wanted something that people could understand right away,” Williamson says. They stuck with the suboptimal key configuration for the same reason it had migrated to computers half a decade ago—familiarity. “When people pick up this phone in the store, it has to be something that’s instantly recognizable, that they can use immediately. And that’s why we stuck with the QWERTY keyboard, and we added a whole bunch of smarts in there.”
Those smarts would be crucial. “People thought that the keyboard we delivered wasn’t sophisticated, but in reality it was super-sophisticated,” Williamson says. “Because the touch region of each key was smaller than the minimum hit size. We had to write a bunch of predictive algorithms technology to think about the words you could possibly be typing, artificially increase the hit area of the next few keys that would correspond to those words.”

So all that was done using machinery designed originally for communication purposes such as teletype communication, store and forward messages, and so on. So we did away with punch cards.
Second thing we wanted to do was to get away from the requirements that punch cards imposed on users, which was that things had to be in certain columns on the card, and so we wanted to be something more or less free form that somebody could type on a teletype keyboard, which is just a standard “qwerty” keyboard, by the way, but only with uppercase letters.
That’s how the form of the language appeared, something that was easy to type, in fact originally it was space-independent. If you put spaces or you didn’t put spaces in what you were typing it didn’t make any difference, because the language was designed originally so that whatever you typed was always interpreted by the computer correctly, even if there were spaces or no spaces.

In graphical mode, you can use the mouse as you would normally on an installed graphical desktop.
Figure 4.2. Selecting the language
4.2.3. Selecting the country
The second step consists in choosing your country. Combined with the language, this information enables the program to offer the most appropriate keyboard layout. This will also influence the configuration of the time zone. In the United States, a standard QWERTY keyboard is suggested, and a choice of appropriate time zones is offered.
Figure 4.3. Selecting the country
4.2.4. Selecting the keyboard layout
The proposed “American English” keyboard corresponds to the usual QWERTY layout.
Figure 4.4. Choice of keyboard
4.2.5. Detecting Hardware
This step is completely automatic in the vast majority of cases. The installer detects your hardware, and tries to identify the CD-ROM drive used in order to access its content.

Here’s just one gem: “It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end.” Might be time for you (and me) to rethink our personal priorities. On a related and sad note, Matt’s father passed away unexpectedly weeks after he recommended this article to me. Matt was at his bedside.
Qwerty Is for Junior Varsity
The normal QWERTY keyboard layout was designed to slow down human operators to avoid jams. That time has passed, so try the Dvorak layout instead, which is easier on your tendons and helps prevent carpal tunnel syndrome. Read The Dvorak Zine (dvzine.org). Colemak is even more efficient, if you dare. Within Automattic, Matt has held speed-typing challenges, where the loser has to switch to the winner’s layout. So far, Dvorak has always beaten QWERTY.

The Pocket Computer was very calculator-like, and Commodore had the infrastructure needed to build such a device. When he was unable to convince Charpentier to develop a handheld LCD computer, he departed for Japan to see if he could bypass his reluctant engineers and obtain the product he desired.
Tramiel returned with a Toshiba IHC-8000. The tiny computer looked like a calculator, with a single row of 24 characters on the LCD and a tiny rubber QWERTY keyboard.
He rebranded it the HHC-4 (Handheld Computer), and replaced the Toshiba decal with a Commodore logo in order to display the product at the upcoming CES.
In the past, Tramiel reacted to the market, often making decisions based on what his competitors sold. In 1982, the Osborne 1 portable microcomputer was selling well, and with it, the Osborne Computer Corporation began remarkable growth.

It was introduced in response to a problem in the early days of the typewriter: The keys used to jam. The idea was to minimize the collision problem by separating those keys that followed one another frequently.... Once {123} adopted, it resulted in many millions of typewriters and ... the social cost of change ... mounted with the vested interest created by the fact that so many fingers now knew how to follow the QWERTY keyboard. QWERTY has stayed on despite the existence of other, more "rational" systems. [Papert 1980, p. 33.]12
The imperious restrictions we encounter inside the Library of Mendel may look like universal laws of nature from our myopic perspective, but from a different perspective they may appear to count as merely local conditions, with historical explanations.13 If so, then a restricted concept of biological possibility is the sort we want; the ideal of a universal concept of biological possibility will be misguided.

Some collective practices have enormous inertia because they impose a high cost on the first individual who would try to change them. A switch from driving on the left to driving on the right could not begin with a daring nonconformist or a grass-roots movement but would have to be imposed from the top down (which is what happened in Sweden at 5 A.M., Sunday, September 3, 1967). Other examples are laying down your weapons when hostile neighbors are armed to the teeth, abandoning the QWERTY keyboard layout, and pointing out that the emperor is not wearing any clothes.
But traditional cultures can change, too, and more dramatically than most people realize. Preserving cultural diversity is considered a supreme virtue today, but the members of the diverse cultures don’t always see it that way. People have wants and needs, and when cultures rub shoulders, people in one culture are bound to notice when their neighbors are satisfying those desires better than they are.

x This tendency to shared error has been labelled ‘the bandwagon effect’: Mirowski, ‘A Visible Hand’ (1994), 574. Pinch appears to think that this is the sole cause of agreement on measurements (Labinger and Collins (eds.), The One Culture? (2001), 223) but that can’t be right, or agreement once established would never break down.
xi Under particular circumstances there may be an economic or institutional investment in a bad solution that allows it to persist. The English-language QWERTY keyboard is an example (David, ‘Clio and the Economics of QWERTY’ (1985)); geocentrism, for the Catholic Church after 1616, is also an example.
xii The issue arose, entirely predictably, shortly after the invention of the pendulum clock (1656), which made possible new standards of accuracy, exposing previously invisible anomalies (Cohen, ‘Roemer and the First Determination of the Velocity of Light (1676)’ (1940), 338).

LCD is okay, supertwist LCD
even better, EL and PLASMA are even better than that, but if you plan to hack at night
or in the dark like most hackers on the road, you should make sure your laptop has a
backlit screen. Color LCD screens are useless unless you plan to call Prodigy or download and view GIFs, in which case you should stop reading this article right now and
go back to play with your Nintendo.
The keyboard should be a standard full-sized QWERTY keyboard, with full travel
plastic keys. You don’t need a numeric keypad or function keys or any of that crap.
Membrane keyboards or chicklet rubber keys are out of the question. Unless you are
utterly retarded, having your keys alphabetized is not an added benefit. Basically, if you
can touch type on a keyboard without your fingers missing keys, getting jammed, or
slipping around, then it is a good keyboard.

But sometimes the advantage of conformity to each individual can lead to pathologies in the group as a whole. A famous example is the way an early technological standard can gain a toehold among a critical mass of users, who use it because so many other people are using it, and thereby lock out superior competitors. According to some theories, these “network externalities” explain the success of English spelling, the QWERTY keyboard, VHS videocassettes, and Microsoft software (though there are doubters in each case). Another example is the unpredictable fortunes of bestsellers, fashions, top-forty singles, and Hollywood blockbusters. The mathematician Duncan Watts set up two versions of a Web site in which users could download garage-band rock music. 273 In one version users could not see how many times a song had already been downloaded.